Video: Rating clips

As you review the footage you've imported into iMovie, you're most likely going to find that some parts are going to be more usable than others. For example, there is almost always some shots of the camera being raised up to shoot, or dropped down at your side when you're done shooting before you stop recording. Or maybe you're like me and have lots of footage of the inside of your camera bag from when you accidentally hit the Record button before putting the camera away. So as you're going through your clips, it's a good idea to mark certain parts as what iMovie refers to as favorites. Favorites are pieces of footage that you've marked as good, so you can easily identify them later when you want to use them in a project.

Rating clips

As you review the footage you've imported into iMovie, you're most likely goingto find that some parts are going to be more usable than others.For example, there is almost always some shots of the camera being raised upto shoot, or dropped down at your side when you're done shooting before you stop recording.Or maybe you're like me and have lots of footage of the inside of your camerabag from when you accidentally hit the Record button before putting the camera away.So as you're going through your clips, it's a good idea to mark certain parts aswhat iMovie refers to as favorites.Favorites are pieces of footage that you've marked as good, so you can easilyidentify them later when you want to use them in a project.

Similarly, you can also mark parts of your clips as rejects and set them up fordeletion so they're not sitting there taking up space on your hard drive.So, let's see how to do this.I'm going to review the footage in my surfing event here. Now there are a coupleof shots here I really like.First of all, let me switch to my view back here to about 5 seconds for theEvent Browser, so I can skim through a little bit easier.And I kind of like the shot of the waves rolling in front of the pier here,and I want to mark this as a favorite.To do so, I just click and drag to select the footage I want to mark. In this case,maybe I want the entire clip,so I'll just start on its left side, drag to the right, and select the entire clip.

I am going to come up here to the toolbar and click the Mark as Favorite button.Notice that instantly puts a green bar at the top of my selection, sowhenever I come back to this event I can see right away that I marked thisfootage as good and usable.And I can do the same with this shot of our surfer friend looking out over the waves.Now maybe this time I don't like the part at the beginning where the camerais sort of getting into position, but the rest of the shot looks good to me,so I'll just skim over it until the camera sort of comes to a rest, rightabout there, and I'll drag to select the rest of the clip there, and markthat as a favorite.

So you can see just that selected portion is marked with the green bar now.Similarly, you can also mark footage as rejected so you don't waste yourtime reviewing it later.For example, maybe this clip here where the camera is in the water and oursubject is probably too far away, and it's pretty shaky camera-work to beginwith, and I'll probably never use this footage.So I'm going to select this footage.I'm just going to click on it once, hit Command+A for select all to select theentire clip, and this time I'm going to click this X button, which is the Reject button.

Notice the footage automatically disappears.That's because I have the default display for my Event Browser selected, whichis Favorites and Unmarked.In this view, I only see the footage that I haven't marked and footage that Ihave marked as a favorite.If I switch to All Clips, you can see that footage comes back, but it's markedwith a red bar so I know I already deemed it unfit for any of my projects.We also have the option of viewing just rejected clips, by selecting RejectedOnly. That's nice in case you want to double-check your work and really makesure there's nothing that you might want to use later.

If you find there is something here you want to use--maybe the second-halfisn't as bad as I thought, for example-- I can just select that portion andthen click the Unmark button, which you can see, it sends just that portion back to my main events here.So that's the basics of rating your clips as favorites or rejects.It does take some time, but if you do this each time when you import yourfootage, it'll make your life so much easier down the road when you need toquickly locate your A material.

You can then just switch your view to Favorites Only and pick from your bestfootage in the event.Next, we'll go a step further and look at some more advanced ways of markingyour footage.

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